163
Rtalph Gray
Lacking Lamp, Young Abe Spent Hours in Study Beside a Blazing Fireplace
This hearth at Rockport, Indiana, duplicates the one by whose light the boy read the Bible. Robinson
Crusoe, Pilgrim's Progress, Aesop's Fables, and Weems's Life of Washington. Paper was scarce; Abe did
arithmetic problems on a wooden shovel, scraping it clean after each exercise (pages 142, 159, 168).
As we drove northwest through Mattoon,
Sullivan, Lovington, and Lake City to De
catur, the streams we crossed were in flood
and the rivers rising. Ten miles west of De
catur we turned south from U. S. 36 to see
the site of the first Lincoln cabin in Illinois,
the point where the trek from Indiana ended,
and found the Sangamon out of its banks.
Decatur is surpassed only by Springfield in
size on the Lincoln National Memorial High
way. A big industry is the A. E. Staley
Manufacturing Company, processing corn and
soybeans into many products.
Split Rails for a Pair of Pants
When the Lincolns arrived here in 1830,
the town was less than a year old. Abe
needed a pair of new trousers. He cut 400
rails for each yard of the material.
Thirty years later, to Decatur's Wigwam
Convention Hall, John Hanks brought sev
eral rails "from a lot of 3,000 made in 1830
by John Hanks and Abe Lincoln."
The State
Republican Convention immediately made
the humble Rail Splitter its unanimous choice
for the Presidential nomination.
The Lincolns' first winter in Illinois was
remembered for years by old-timers as the
bad winter of 1830-31. Successive snow
storms covered the prairies four feet deep.
Cattle died in the fields. Cabin-bound set
tlers existed on unmilled corn; some starved
to death. The Lincolns and other new set
tlers who had no reserve food fared badly.
In February a trader named Denton Offutt
engaged Abe and two kinsmen to take a flat
boat to New Orleans. When the snow went
off, the trio found Offutt drunk in Springfield
and no boat. They built their own craft,
Offutt provided the cargo, and they ran
down the Sangamon, Illinois, and Mississippi
Rivers to New Orleans.
They had barely started the long float when
their flatboat stuck on the milldam at New
Salem. While extricating it, Abe had a chance
to look over the new log cabin village on the
bluff. When he returned from New Orleans,
he said goodbye to his family and, at the age
of 22, started out on his own. His destina
tion: New Salem.
Lincoln canoed from near Decatur to his
new home. Part of the route retraced his
flatboat trip earlier in the year and later was
the scene of his helping to pilot the Talisman,
first and only steamboat ever to reach the
Springfield vicinity.